Isn’t 50% too high?
A universal basic income plus the healthcare component costs a lot of money. The 50% tax on new income is how we pay for it. That’s not spin — that’s math.
The reason we’re $40 trillion in debt is that the people who came before us increased spending without raising taxes to pay for it. As a former math teacher, I can tell you: that’s not how math works. If we’re going to build something this big, we pay for it. No more putting it on the national credit card and handing the bill to the next generation.
Everyone pays the same percentage — billionaires and Uber drivers. No loopholes, no special rates for people who can afford expensive accountants. The actual dollar amount is more for some than others, but the rules are the same for everyone.
Think about Monopoly. Pass Go, collect $200 — that’s a UBI if there ever was one. The problem is nobody pays taxes in that game, and over time, all but one player gets wiped out. We’re pretty close to that now. The difference is: even if we go bankrupt in real life, we still have to play the game. And what most people don’t realize is that the person who wins also loses — if nobody else has money to pay rent or buy anything, the winner can’t spend either. Money has to circulate or the whole system dies.
Won’t people stop working?
The Floor isn’t a living — it’s a floor. At $4,000 a month, the argument shifts: most people want more than just enough. People don’t aspire to a floor — they aspire to build.
Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend has paid every resident for 40+ years. Employment didn’t drop.
The jobs people quit are the ones they should quit. If a workforce would leave for the Floor, that’s a confession, not a critique. The Floor gives workers bargaining power — that’s how markets are supposed to work.
Most people want to do something that matters. The Floor lets them choose to — and not have to settle for the first thing to come along. Work can now be associated with pride rather than just a paycheck.
The Floor makes work worth it. Without it, every dollar goes to survival. With it, earning becomes additive — save for a better car, a down payment, start a business. Health, education, risk-taking, kids’ stability all improve. The paycheck goes from a treadmill to a ladder.
The Floor doesn’t make people stop working. It makes work matter for the first time.
What about fraud and price gouging?
These are just a few of the scenarios I’ve already considered. I didn’t come up with this concept yesterday.
COVID showed us where the real fraud risk is — and it’s not downstream. Recipients spending money on groceries aren’t the fraud risk. It’s landlords who jack rent the day payments hit. It’s companies that triple prices on essentials. The predators circle the money, not the people receiving it.
The answer isn’t chasing gouging by raising payments to keep up with prices — that spikes inflation. That’s what happened during COVID. We jump on price gouging directly and immediately.
How? Anonymized spending pattern analysis — the same way public health tracks disease outbreaks. We don’t need to know who’s sick, just where the clusters are. Spending pattern mapping shows where prices spike abnormally. The pattern data is public. Everyone has access to the same maps. Citizens become part of the enforcement — anyone can flag a hotspot, ask why prices spiked, and avoid gougers. Distributed accountability, not a surveillance bureau.
The transparency itself is the deterrent: gougers can’t hide when thousands of people see the same heat map. And public transparency defangs government overreach. When everyone sees the same data, no agency can weaponize it — no information asymmetry to exploit. The watchers are watched. Same principle as the privacy platform.
Due process is baked in: patterns flag the hotspot, then a warrant and proper investigation. Constitutional from the start.
What about individual-level fraud? Identity theft, collecting after death, multiple SSNs — most of these already exist with Social Security and current programs, with existing countermeasures. The simpler the program, the harder it is to defraud. One universal payment with one identity check is easier to secure than fifteen programs with fifteen different eligibility rules.
Got a question that’s not here? Send it. The best challenges come from the people who’d actually live with this. I’ll add answers as they come in.